The Sackler Courtyard – a new addition to the Victoria & Albert museum in London. Photograph: AFP Contributor/AFP/Getty Images

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Members of the multibillionaire philanthropic Sackler family that owns the maker of prescription painkiller OxyContin are facing mass litigation and likely criminal investigation over the opioids crisis still ravaging America.

Some of the Sacklers wholly own Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma – the company that created and sells the legal narcotic OxyContin – a drug at the center of the opioid epidemic that now kills almost 200 people a day across the US.

Suffolk county in Long Island – New York recently sued several family members personally over the overdose deaths and painkiller addiction blighting local communities.

Now lawyers warn that action will be a catalyst for hundreds of other US cities – counties and states to follow suit.

At the same time prosecutors in Connecticut and New York are understood to be considering criminal fraud and racketeering charges against leading family members over the way OxyContin has allegedly been dangerously overprescribed and deceptively marketed to doctors and the public over the years – legal sources told the Guardian last week.

‘This is essentially a crime family … drug dealers in nice suits and dresses’ said Paul Hanly – a New York city lawyer who represents Suffolk county and is also a lead attorney in a huge civil action playing out in federal court in Cleveland Ohio involving opioid manufacturers and distributors.

The Sackler name is prominently attached to prestigious cultural and academic institutions that have accepted millions donated by the family in the US and the UK.

It is now inscribed on a lawsuit alleging members of the family ‘actively participated in conspiracy and fraud to portray the prescription painkiller as non-addictive – even though they knew it was dangerously addictive’.

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Even if you’re a public defender or work for Médecins Sans Frontières – insofar as your labor is determined by a system of abstract compulsion—insofar that is as it exists within capitalism—it’s bullshit.

You know this.

In his new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory – David Graeber is interested in a particular variety of bullshit and work.

In 2013 the anthropologist and anarchist (he hates to be called ‘the anarchist anthropologist’) published an essay slamming the proliferation of ‘pointless jobs’ that seem to exist

‘just for the sake of keeping us all working’.

The response was tremendous: It turns out that many people have jobs that they believe require them to do nothing of value (or to do nothing whatsoever while trying to appear to be doing something).

Graeber sifted through the responses and solicited additional input on Twitter in a quest to categorize the ‘five basic types of bullshit jobs’ and document the absurdist travails of those who hold them.

From such data he constructed a working definition of the subject at hand:

[A] bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless – unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment – the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Graeber distinguishes these bullshit jobs from ‘shit jobs’ which serve a purpose but suck.

Which is not to say that bullshit jobs don’t suck as well but they suck precisely because they don’t serve a purpose.

Much of the stress they produce—the ‘spiritual violence’ as Graeber terms it—results from the contortionist maneuvers that employees are forced to perform in order to pretend to be working when they have nothing to do.

And as Graeber notes this sense of purposelessness is widespread: To give just two examples – 37 percent of the UK respondents to a poll on the subject and 40 percent of the Dutch ones – insisted that their work is utterly useless.

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Florida is suing the nation’s two largest drugstore chains – Walgreens and CVS – alleging they added to the state and national opioid crisis by overselling painkillers and not taking precautions to stop illegal sales.

The state attorney general Pam Bondi announced late on Friday that she had added the companies to a state-court lawsuit filed last spring against Purdue Pharma – the maker of OxyContin and several opioid distributors.

Bondi said in a press release that CVS and Walgreens ‘played a role in creating the opioid crisis’.

She said the companies failed to stop ‘suspicious orders of opioids’ and ‘dispensed unreasonable quantities of opioids from their pharmacies’.

On average about 45 people die nationally each day because of opioid overdoses – according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

‘We will continue to pursue those companies that played a role in creating the opioid crisis’ said Bondi – who has been mentioned as a possible replacement by President Donald Trump for the recently ousted US attorney general – Jeff Sessions.

‘Thousands of Floridians have suffered as a result of the actions of the defendants’.

A CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis called the lawsuit ‘without merit’ in a statement on Saturday.

He said the company trains its pharmacists and their assistants about their responsibilities when dispensing controlled substances and gives them tools to detect potentially illegal sales.

Walgreens said on Saturday it does not comment on pending lawsuits.

Until a law enforcement crackdown at the beginning of the decade Florida was known for its so-called pain mills.

Drug dealers from throughout the country would send associates to store-front clinics where unscrupulous doctors would write opioid prescriptions for bogus injuries and illnesses.

At one point 90 of the nation’s top 100 opioid prescribers were Florida doctors – according to federal officials.

After receiving the prescriptions the phoney patients would buy the pills from Florida pharmacies – state law says pharmacists must refuse to fill prescriptions they suspect are not for a valid purpose.

Most of the opioids would then be taken out of state to be resold illegally at huge markups – creating a drug crisis in many communities throughout the eastern United States.

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Supermarket checkouts and promotional displays are loaded with obesity-fuelling sweets and sugary drinks aimed at enticing young children who are shopping with their parents – new research has revealed.

High-sugar or calorie products – set to be included on a government blacklist – account for 70 per cent of food and drink in these high-visibility areas at five leading supermarkets’ stores – according to the Obesity Health Alliance (OHA).

Less than 1 per cent of food or drink in these high-visibility areas were fruit or vegetable products.